Gartner Case Study on Unified Communication in Higher Education

Thanks to some research I’m doing on behalf of a university in North East England, one of my colleagues in the US passed on details of the University of Kentucky and the project to implement a unified communications platform. This has surfaced both a Microsoft and Gartner case study.

In summary the Gartner study shows how the university implemented a Unified Communications solution to:

Cut costs – no surprise there

Enhance communications

Provide a uniformity for communications across the university

The Gartner case study is stated as being explicitly for the UK, which is interesting to note. Naturally, the technology deployed is my current favourite – Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007. In the UK, getting on for forty universities now have the software licences to deploy OCS across their campus which means that these could already be achieving the savings, efficiencies and enhancements that is written about in the case studies. In addition to this, those universities could also federate to enhance communication and collaboration with other HE institutions, research partners/funders, employers and students.